reflections from the real world
Elementary, My Dear Watson: Neurons That
Fire Together Stay Wired Together
by Jamil Mahuad
| Former President of Ecuador | jmahuad@law.harvard.edu
Democracy and Politics
If politics is “the method to decide who
gets what and who pays the price,” there
are two prices to consider: a “prize” that
some people get and a “price” which some
others pay. The separation between payers
and beneficiaries, winners and losers is
clearly connected to politics. Societies
adopt a system and an accepted set of rules
and practices to play this distributive game.
Democracy, “the worst form of
government, except for all those other
forms that have been tried from time to
time,” according to Winston Churchill, has
proven to be the most popular way to
exercise politics nowadays. Democratic
rules decide the whos (who will participate
and how; who will make the final call on
contentious issues) and the whats (what are
the stakes, the options, the rewards).
Democracy appears to many as a solid,
clear, precise, and self-evident concept. To
others, democracy looks like a porous,
fuzzy, too general, ambiguous idea that
requires adjectives and qualifications to be
properly grasped.
What are the essential elements of
democracy? What gives democracy its
specificity?
In Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address,
the president described a government “of
the people, by the people, and for the
people.” His dictum contains the three
essential tests of democratic legitimacy:
Legitimacy 1: Legitimacy of origin. The
government should be “of” the people.
The will of “We, the people” expressed
through an open and fair electoral
process decides who has the right to
govern.
Legitimacy 2: Legitimacy of procedures.
A democratic government should be
presided over “by” authorities
representative of the population who
enforce the rule of law.
Legitimacy 3: Legitimacy of results. By
leading economic growth and applying
redistributive policies, governments work
“for” the people. Governments should
serve first and foremost the interests of
the majority of the population while
respecting the rights of the minorities.
Many governments in developing countries
have consistently failed at least one
legitimacy test. Freely elected governments
in Latin America in the “lost decade” of the
1980s were not able to promote economic
growth and social progress. They failed the
third legitimacy test.
In the 1970s’ Cold War atmosphere,
authoritarian regimes deposed many
democratic governments arguing that to
stop communism and eliminate chaos
(Legitimacy 3) compensated for the lack of
legitimacy of origin and method. They
failed legitimacy tests 1 and 2.
Some elected governments have blamed the
inadequacy of institutions for their
incapacity to lead development. They
orchestrated autogolpes sacrificing the
legitimacy of behavior at the altar of the
frequently illusory legitimacy of results.
The present is an excellent time for
Legitimacy 3 in Latin America. Since 2003
the region’s exports have increased in
volume and price due especially to the
strong growth of the Chinese economy.
However, Legitimacy 1 and 2 suffer in the
few places where government controls the
independent media.
This article reflects on the building up of
Legitimacy 1. Neuroscience, by explaining
human decision making, contributes to
clarify how voters decide which authorities
and rules would come “of” the people.
Neuroscience and Decision Making
Two famous political expressions attempt
to prescribe political practices: Nazi
propagandist Goebbels said, “Repeat a lie
one thousand times and it becomes the
truth”; Machiavelli wrote, “To govern is to
make believe.” What does neuroscience
have to say about these statements?
Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, considered
the “greatest living Canadian” in the 1960s,
demonstrated that our brain collects and
retrieves memories by bundling together
events and their associated feelings, storing
them in a physically accessible part of our
brain, and constructing a neural pathway
to reach them. If a certain stimulus triggers
the playback key, we not only remember
but involuntarily relive the stored
experience with its original intensity. We
can discover the impulse that evokes the
positive or negative stored memory.
In 1964, while working for President
Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidential campaign,
Tony Schwartz applied the same basic
understanding of the human brain’s activity
to generate his insightful Resonance Theory
of Communication and tested it in practice
with the “Daisy ad,” poised to become the
most famous TV ad in political history.
Campaigns are not the right moment to
educate the audience, to give them new
information to process, Schwartz thought.
How a voter feels about a candidate
determines how she votes. Any
communication activates unconscious brain
networks; effective communication triggers
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the “right” one to elicit the expected
emotional response. Voting is not a
rational decision-making process; it is
rather a highly emotional one.
When accused of manipulating people,
Schwartz argued that the messenger could
not do anything without the receiver’s
cooperation. In the worst case, he said, he
would be accused of “partipulating”
because he offers the stimulus and the other
provides the reaction. Communication is a
collaborative effort. Electoral campaigns
will never be the same after Schwartz’s
theory. Marshall McLuhan called him the
“guru of electronic media.”
Professor Gary Orren has been teaching the
very popular course “Persuasion: the
Science and Art of Effective Influence” for
decades at the Harvard Kennedy School.
The golden rule of persuasion is to know
your audience, he says. Whom are you
speaking to? They would be persuaded if
they perceive that your message is salient
(relevant to their lives), simple (easy to
understand and remember), and sound
(appealing to their rationality).
George Lakoff shocked our political minds
by defending the idea that we think inside
frames coming from the “metaphors we
live by.” The mind is in the brain, he
believes. As we can’t rationally control our
neural system, most of our reasoning is
unconscious, hence emotional.
Daniel Kahneman, the first psychologist to
win the Nobel Prize in economics (2002),
in his best seller Thinking, Fast and Slow
explains that humans have two systems of
thinking. System 1 is automatic, fast,
hyperactive, nonrational, and cannot be
deactivated at will; System 2 is slow, lazy,
fact-based, and needs to be voluntarily
engaged.
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We spend most of our time in our
emotional self, in System 1 (basically
impressions and desires). System 2 follows
system 1 (we believe our impressions and
act on our desires) contextualizing them
with explicit beliefs and deliberate choices.
Reflecting on the well-known “Invisible
Gorilla Experiment,” Kahneman highlights
how intensely focusing on an imposed task
(counting ball passes and ignoring one of
the teams) can make people effectively
blind. “We can be blind to the obvious…be
blind to our blindness.” No one who
watches the video without knowing the
task would miss the gorilla in the scene.
Airwaves Are to Elections What Airpower
Is to War
Political consultants know that the act of
voting is the corollary of a three-step
process. The electoral campaign’s purpose
is not to change the voter’s intention (final
result) but to influence every instance of the
voter’s decision making by working on the
stimulus/associations network. Campaign
communication strategies develop three
objectives in sequence:
Step 1: Get name recognition. A person
needs to “exist,” to get into the “political
menu,” to be in the top of the mind
recollection of the voter to become a
viable candidate. Getting a recognizable
name takes a lot of time and/or money.
Competition is fierce. Newspapers,
radio, and TV screens are already
cluttered with familiar names and faces.
Incumbents have the upper hand in
Step 1.
Step 2: Win the favorability contest.
Candidates evoke strong emotional
reactions. That is why it is not possible
to wrap them up nicely to “sell” them
like emotionally inert industrial products.
The favorable/unfavorable ratio opens
the space for increasing vote intention or
limits it with a low ceiling cap.
Step 3: Harden the favorability ratio.
Investigate the reasons for the emotional
reaction expressed in Step 2. Unveil the
trigger and the emotional/belief bundle
associated with it. Discover what aspects
of the candidate’s appearance, positions,
or actions make the click. After
understanding why voters like or dislike
a candidate it is possible to measure the
depth of their emotional reaction and
figure out how to deactivate that circuit
or create and activate an alternative one.
“Hard” voters—either for or against—are
very difficult if not impossible to change
due to their strong allegiance. They enter
into their familiar stimulus/recollection
groove and remain there. “Soft” voters, in
contrast, can be influenced by the spreading
of “information”—false or true—about any
candidate.
Negative campaigns create or reinforce
negative associations. They work at Step 3
in order to change Step 2, the favorable/
unfavorable ratio.
The decision to vote for or against a
candidate is the logical consequence of this
process: if I know somebody (Step 1), have
a favorable opinion about him/her (Step 2)
based on solid reasons (Step 3), I will vote
for him/her.
This process is public. In a mass society, it
needs to be implemented through the mass
media, the only mechanism to get to the
eyes and ears of all voters. Voters have the
right to access different perspectives on
reality and evaluate them before making
their choices. The legitimacy of origin is
based on debate. Political debate clarifies
concepts, exposes risks, analyzes options
and compares alternatives. It is democracy
at work.
We lose this practice when economic or
political powers control access to media.
The control or monopoly of mass media
plus the relentless repetition of a “unique
selling proposition” is a poisonous
combination for democracy. It substitutes
propaganda in place of information. Later
propaganda becomes ideology, the only
valid truth that deserves to be disseminated.
Unfortunately, a few Latin American
governments enthusiastically embrace the
Orwellian Ministry of Truth concept. They
suppress or capture independent media
through blatant abuse of power,
manipulation of judges, or economic
asphyxia. The government-controlled
media exclusively broadcast government
propaganda; they saturate air and print
spaces with ideology disguised as
information. They cancel debates,
eliminate discussion, disqualify, threaten,
and ostracize opponents. Where is
Legitimacy 1 in that atmosphere?
If we don’t understand the emotional
mechanisms of human decision making, we
will not realize how a totalitarian-inspired
but research-based, strategically planned,
artistically designed, massively broadcasted
campaign inundates the voter’s System 1
and practically eliminates consideration of
other options. Such a campaign destroys
the essence of democracy while playing
within apparently democratic rules.
organized lines in front of the voting
booths.
References
The democratic spirit is resilient, however.
Lawyers and computer programmers
frequently remind us that we undo actions
in the same way that we do them. To
restore a democratic lifestyle we need to
eliminate absolute truths and reopen the
capacity to doubt, reframe, and disseminate
antagonistic perspectives. We need to
generate a critical mass, a choir of
discordant voices, and guarantee them
access to mass media. Redundancy here is
not a vice but a virtue.
2011 Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
In summary, words, facial expressions, and
body language activate neural circuits. The
most-used brain circuits (neurons that fire
together) become the default “thinking”
(neurons stay wired together). We can
easily mix illusion and reality through
consistent repetition controlled by mass
media that “nails” as a truth a bundle of
carefully intertwined threads of emotional
stimuli.
2003 Metaphors We Live By. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Kahneman, Daniel
Lakoff, George
2004 Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your
Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential
Guide for Progressives. White River Junction,
VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.
2008 The Political Mind: Why You Can’t
Understand 21st-Century Politics with an
18th-Century Brain. New York: Viking.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson
Schwartz, Tony
1974 The Responsive Chord. New York:
Doubleday.
1983 Media, the Second God. New York:
Doubleday. Beware of those that apply Goebbels’s
“Repeat a lie one thousand times” aiming
to achieve Machiavelli’s “To govern is to
make believe” and cynically claim
democratic titles. They are using
democracy to destroy Democracy.
If we are not aware of the modern
mechanisms of persuasion we can naively
support these totalitarian attitudes by, for
example, certifying elections as clean and
fair based on formal administrative
procedures or election-day conduct like
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